


hexed, or maybe charmed

by celebreultimaverba, Royalwriter



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Half-Veela Twins, Muggleborn Barry, another fucking niche au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-25
Updated: 2018-04-28
Packaged: 2019-04-27 20:55:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14433897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celebreultimaverba/pseuds/celebreultimaverba, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Royalwriter/pseuds/Royalwriter
Summary: Lup met Barry in her third year, the first time she ever felt what it was like for someone to take her soul from her.Somehow, that wasn't what made her dislike him.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Alternate title: Yet Another Niche, Self-Indulgent AU. We're getting really good at these.

Lup knows exactly how it starts.

Well, she thinks she does, anyways. It was third year, and she knew the secret passageways in the castle because she and Taako loved sneaking around and meeting and breaking curfews when they weren’t allowed to sleep in the same dorms. It was the school’s own fault that they split the twins up—though Lup now can’t think of any better house for herself than Gryffindor, back then it had seemed like the most unfair thing in the world for their new school to have split them so cruelly down the middle.

They’d come in late, finally giving in to the pressure that those tempting wax-sealed envelopes had exerted. After their aunt had died it seemed like the safest bet, the stablest bet. Lup still hadn’t had all of her textbooks, preferring instead to steal them from various first and second years as she studied her way through embarrassing remedial courses. She wasn’t going to waste money on any stupid textbooks when some eleven year olds found her plenty scary.

It was with the education of a second year a third of the way through school and the enthusiasm of a newly teenage pyromaniac knowing she won’t be caught that Lup entered into this particular passage. It didn’t really go anywhere, and it was pretty well-known by the student body, but no one ever bothered checking it and by the rumors that Lup had heard, it was also entirely soundproof. Which was definitely good for her, considering she had in hand two to three pounds of enchanted fireworks.

Honestly, calling them fireworks was probably an overstatement. Her remedial Charms tutor had just taught her how to make and direct various colored sparks and she’d kinda applied her knowledge practically. Really, little thirteen-year-old Lup was simply being a good, good student by breaking the rules. Regardless, it was something she’d needed to hide, and the castle was so good for hiding.

It was just bad luck that Barry had been there.

It was just worse luck that he’d been doing, like, dark magic there. Though, honestly in the long run it was probably good for them both they she’d seen.

“Uh,” she said, very eloquently.

Barry had looked up, eyes widening and wand thunking on the stone floor as Lup looked over his setup. She just kind of took in the whole thing, the ritual circle and dead mouse and little jar and a candle, probably with some spell components around but she hadn’t been paying _that_ much attention. “Uh.”

“Good talk.” To be entirely fair to them, of course, it had been the first time that they’d ever really spoken. Lup knew Barry’s name, and had just now come to the realization that he was apparently a nerd who did dark magic like a creep in abandoned secret hallways. Such a realization would give anybody pause.

“It’s not— what it looks like?” he’d said, and she laughed, eyeing the whole setup.

“Uh, really? Cuz it looks like some weird shit dark magic that you’re going over right now,” she’d said, and somehow that had made them both relax. At least the elephant in the room was cleared out. Now it was just— a dead mouse in the room.

“Well, I mean, it looks like that, yeah, but it’s not. It’s just a little, um, I mean, it’s necromancy but it’s not _that_ much necromancy, it’s just, you know, a little bit. What— why are you here for?”

Lup looked down at the fireworks in her hands and quickly hid them behind her back. “Nothing.”

“Are those fireworks? Were you going to set those off in here?”

“Only to test them!”

There’s a beat, and Lup felt very, very close to Barry when he’d said, quiet, “I won’t tell anyone about your shit if you don’t tell anyone about my shit.”

Lup had kind of grinned and brought her hands out from behind her back, lighting the end of one of the sparking ones with a snap and lobbing it at his head. “Deal.”

In retrospect, it might not have been the best course of action to chuck a lit firework at a dude who had just been in the middle of a necromantic ritual, but Lup at that time of her life had been more hot than rational. It worked for her, but just then, it didn’t work out as well as it usually did, because he’d jumped, tried and failed to catch the firework, then, like, _something_ in the circle had caught fire and he’d freaked a bit, quickly putting out the fire and scrambling for a book open next to him (nerd). “Oh, shit,” he’d said, and Lup suddenly felt very woozy as the mouse in front of him started twitching and— well, she was _pretty_ sure that its blood started boiling but that was less obvious.

She’s not proud of the fact that she kinda whimpered and dropped her fireworks, moving to the wall to keep herself upright because it felt like something a little vital was drained from her. Barry had taken a second to restore the circle, read some incantation in something not-Latin from the book, and suddenly that feeling was gone and nausea was there.

Lup had recovered, breathing a little hard, and it only filtered in through her ears that Barry was apologizing when she was collecting her dropped fireworks again. She looked up at him, and slapped her hand over his mouth, before realizing that he could be just as gross as her brother and lick her hand. He didn’t, but when she dropped her hand she had at least succeeded with the whole making him shut the hell up thing.

“What happened there?” she asked, genuinely curious. The fear she’d had when she thought that she might be dying had all but disappeared, replaced by an actual interest in the whole process and how the fuck _that_ whole shit had happened. If chucking fireworks at dark magic ritual circles always got to be like this, well, then, clearly she should be rethinking that whole mode of expressing herself.

“Sorry. You, uh—”

She waved off his apology, shushing him. “Nah, no, it’s cool, it was my fault, we’re all cool. No need to apologize. What’d I fuck up, how’d that happen?”

He paused, and looked back at the open book. “I think your soul might have gotten siphoned off a little bit to reanimate that mouse? Which was not supposed to happen at all, ideally, and the whole process was very inefficient, more than likely, because this ritual wasn’t supposed to do that? But I put it back. I think.”

Lup listened, more interested in Barry’s nerdy ramblings than she thinks she ever was in History of Magic, and she thought about herself, and how she was feeling, and yeah, soul siphoning was pretty much in line with that. She nodded. “Makes sense. Thanks for returning that baby, I think I need it.”

She, again, felt like she should have felt more scared, but instead she was just interested as fuck. Scared apparently wasn’t happening, so she just kind of accepted the fucked-up interest. “What was _supposed_ to happen?”

Barry looked a bit awkward for a second, and moved away to start collecting up his materials. “Well, it was supposed to take the energy this dead mouse has and just, kinda, transfer that energy into, like, some of these things.” He gestured to the herbs around him. “Make them wither and stuff.”

Lup finished picking up her fireworks and scooted forward. “Can I watch?”

He looked up at her, eyes wide. She had grinned. “I won’t tell if you won’t tell.”

* * *

It wasn’t necessarily a _bad_ interaction, despite the whole soul siphoning thing. They hadn’t talked much after, even though Lup’s wide-eyed interest had seemingly been genuine, simply because they didn’t cross paths much. Barry had become a Prefect, responsible and academic, a fantastic candidate for the job. Lup… had not. Done that.

In fact, Lup and Taako tended to get more detentions than Prefect badges.

If he had to pick where it started, he would say for him it was there, fifth year—Lup caught up with her peers and was nothing but fiery; a real pain in the ass to professors and Prefects alike, along with her brother. Barry had no strong feelings about her, at least not until he was the one who had to give her one of said detentions.

See, Lup kept her little obsession with fireworks even after one had almost killed her indirectly, and she’d only gotten better with them. From the ones that simply showered colored sparks when lit, she’d graduated to swirls and patterns, and by fifth year, she was up to whole pictures, a dragon soaring across the Great Hall’s ceiling and then disappearing in a flurry of sparks that had set one of the tables on fire. It was very cool, Barry could give her that one, but it also wasn’t supposed to happen and she had to get detention for it, a fact that she seemingly understood but didn’t seem to enjoy much. He wasn’t going to penalize her for enjoying fireworks, but also setting them off in the Great Hall was certainly something to give detention for, considering he’d seen it.

The scene went down as follows:

Barry approached Lup with a determination that had convinced himself that he should be the one to give the detention, despite the fact he hadn’t given many in the past. Really, if she was going to do it where he could see, he reasoned, she kind of deserved the detention. Deserved it either way, but at least he knew that he was giving the right person detention. Granted, there weren’t many other people who could produce fireworks like that unless they’d snuck them into the castle—possible, but a pain in the ass—and Lup was rather proud of her pyrotechnics, and didn’t make that a secret.

He’d tapped her on the shoulder and she’d made sure that her robes swung dramatically around her feet when she’d turned, giving him a lazy sort of smile. “Yeeeeeeeesssss, Barold?” she’d asked, drawing out the yes almost to ridiculousness.

Almost to ridiculous seemed to be the MO for the twins. They’d never cross that line, but they certainly had everyone sitting up and taking notice.

“You set off those fireworks this afternoon,” he accused.

Lup laughed, looking over to Taako then back to her accuser. “Sure, yes.”

“I’m letting you know, you can serve your detentions as soon as possible.”

Her lazy smile shot to a frown, closing off her expression so quickly that Barry was reminded of a bear trap.

Or maybe a Bar trap. Oh lord.

“I’m sorry, I must have misheard, Barry. You said detention?”

He nodded. “I mean, obviously. You do need punished for that.”

Lup grinned. “Kinky. Listen, can we, like… not do that? At all? I mean, if we’re honest, I didn’t even _mean_ for those bad boys to go off like that. Not my fault if they went for Greg’s ass instead of the beautiful midautumnal sky, right?”

Barry was surprised, kind of cocking his head in half-wonder at the fact that Lup would be negotiating right now. “That… doesn’t make it better. You do realize how them going off accidentally doesn’t make it better, right? Super, like, dangerous and stuff?”

“Boring. It’s just some magic fireworks. You used to be cool, Barry. What happened to that necromancy you were doing?”

His eyes flitted fearfully to Taako, who looked bored by the whole situation, and it processed that, yeah, Lup probably told Taako about that whole encounter the second after she left. Taako absolutely had the same amount of blackmail material that Lup did. Which, yeah, Barry was pretty sure, now, that this was blackmail. Lup was lowkey threatening him. Which, alright. Okay. Alright. Okay. Alright.

Okay.

Alright.

“Still doing it,” he said.

He winced. She laughed. “And you’re still not being cool?”

Yeah, okay, threat. “You’re getting the detentions.”

Lup frowned, clearly not happy at the news. “Fine,” she replied, a little hissy. “I’ll show up to whatever dumb thing you all are gonna have me do, and I’ll do it fuckin’ great. Is that all you needed, Mr. Prefect?”

“That’s all I needed,” Barry replied, small smile on his face.

He’d walked away, then, feeling like he had won. And he felt, of course, that he was justified in that feeling, because Lup had, after all, threatened him with blackmail and yet he had still given her a detention like she deserved, there was, of course, a certain measure of integrity there, and though he would later learn that no threat was in fact being made, it had been the start of something. He and Lup bumped heads… a lot, as students. It was only somewhat academic. These kinds of rivalries happened often. Barry enjoyed them. He enjoyed winning them even more.

* * *

Lup had walked away from the same interaction with a similar feeling of victory, though she certainly _had_ gotten a detention. It was all in how one looked at it, though—had she gotten a detention? Yes. Had she lost any dignity? No, and therefore she had won—detention was kinda hot, good for her image, though it wasn’t the most ideal win.

She resolved to continue to win these contests with Barry, as little and inconsequential as they were. Of course, when paired with pride, were _any_ contests little or inconsequential? The answer was no, especially not when Lup had entered them. _Nothing_ Lup did was _ever_ little and inconsequential.

It is therefore, with great gravitas, and a teensy bit of sexuality, that Lup adds one last stipulation to her messily-but-like-in-a-cool-way looped handwritten list slash contract slash gambling terms. And, oh, she _is_ going to win this one.

And so, to the list titled _List of Demands and Terms to be Carried to Completion by Barry J. Bluejeans Upon Lup Taaco’s Inevitable (Academic) Kicking of His Choice Denimed Ass_ Lup adds, technically illegally, one last bullet point.

_Barry J. Bluejeans must make out with Lup Taaco a minimum of once. Said make-out session may include touching, groping, and all elements and manners necessary for good kissing (tongue, the physical touching of the lips, and so forth). This act must be performed within the appropriate time frame (i.e. before Barry J. Bluejeans leaves for winter break for his wonderful mother)._

Oh, that will show him.


	2. Chapter 2

Barry’s sitting in the Room of Requirement waiting for Lup to show up so they can make good on a bet, and his heart might just beat out of his chest. 

Barry understands fully how he got himself into this situation. Well, Barry understands most parts of how he got himself into this situation. Okay, Barry understands about a third of what happened, and attributes the rest of it to the sheer chaotic energy that is Lup. Academically, they’d been on par from the moment Lup caught up. And well, neither of them knew what to do with that.

Or they _hadn’t_ known what to do that with that. Lup figured it out quickly.

He had walked through the door to Hogwarts with his new Head Boy pin shined to perfection, ready to start the year off right, and immediately a shadow fell over him.

Lup had positioned her body so Barry was cornered against a wall, and she towered over him now. That’d been one of their ongoing competitions before he left for the summer. Whoever was taller won some sort of moral victory.

Barry never thought he’d concede a bet that quickly, but six inches of growth overnight didn’t seem likely.

“Woah, Barold, did someone apparate with you over the summer and splice off a couple of inches? Or are you just that determined to lose to me this year?” Besides the height, it was apparent that Lup hadn’t changed a bit.

“Guess— I guess biology decided you needed a leg up, since it’s the only thing you’ll be winning,” Barry retorted, though some of the effect of his comeback was lost as his voice stuck in his throat. She was distracting, and he didn’t have much room, and the summer had been long, and in all honesty, Barry was just not the king of comebacks.

“They gave one of these to you too, huh? Shouldn’t be surprised, you’ve been on that track in their eyes for a while, haven’t you? Barry J. Bluejeans, _stupendous_ student, _astute_ rule follower,” Lup said.

Her grin slid into a smirk as she listed various titles and attributes. It twisted. It turned into something that resembled a cat playing with a mouse. Barry knew he was the mouse, and he swallowed tightly. Lup tapped at his badge before pulling something out of her pocket and waving it lightly in his face. After a second he realized it was also a badge. This had to be a joke. No way had she managed to earn herself a position as Head Girl.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t intelligent! She just didn’t _follow the rules._

“You’re Head Girl? Did you finally give up on your fireworks and other, y’know, acts of debauchery?” he said. 

Lup had pushed herself off the wall with a laugh. “Nope, took a page out of _your_ book, and stopped getting caught,” she winked over her shoulder and sauntered off with Taako at her side.

That was when Barry strapped in for the ride of his life.

Though it was really only the start of this whole situation, that left him in this room, now, waiting for Lup.

* * *

Lup needs stakes. Competing could be fun, but betting always beat it, and she needs stakes _for_ said bet. Something to strive for, as she and Barry trade off top scores by halves of percentage points. A month into this whole Head Boy/Head Girl head-to-head, and they were still close enough that teachers refused to call them anything but tied.

She needs motivation, something to fear, and so a list seemed reasonable. It only takes her a moment for her first demand, one she underlines about three times.

_1\. Barold J. Bluejeans must wear something other than the same fucking pair of bell bottoms for at least three out of uniform days. If alternate lower half wear is needed, a list of suggestions are amended to the back of this list._

That at least solved her biggest problem with him. The rest of the list came easily, and so she was able to roll it up and head off on her quest.

Now, technically she was prohibited from going _into_ the Hufflepuff dorms, but freshmen really needed to learn to watch their backs! It’s almost like they weren’t expecting someone to follow behind them with a stealth spell. Their fault for not automatically assuming that, really. 

She saunters her way into the common room and up the stairs, because she’d also been able to figure out which dorm was Barry’s with, honestly, _minimal_ intimidation. Freshmen _really_ needed to get it together. The door isn’t even locked when she pushes on it! Too, too easy.

“Bluejeans,” she commands when the door opens. Barry startles at the sudden voice, knocking over a cup of coffee that had been sitting next to him while he pored through a book. God, he was such a fucking _nerd_. It’s a Friday night! Even Lup doesn’t study on Fridays.

Without giving him a chance to find words or recover, Lup shoves the book out of his lap, and draped herself across it instead. She tucks one arm around Barry’s shoulders to steady herself, and crosses her legs in the air. Barry turns beet red—excellent—and finally finds words.

“What— What is happening? Lup, what is going on? How— How did you even get in here? There’s a whole system and— You can’t just _do_ this!” His brow furrows, and Lup can’t stop herself rolling her eyes. God, he could be _such_ a drama queen. She only broke into his room.

“Listen, we’re betting. Me and you, officially competing. Not this half-ass, unacknowledged competition we have going on now. Here’s my terms, written out all lawerly for you. You write yours, and whoever—me, obvi—gets the best grades by the end of the semester has to do everything on the other’s list.” 

Lup shoves the list at him, and shifted so he could move his arms just enough to read it.

“You want me to sign a betting contract with you?” Barry blinks at her, disbelieving, and she rolls her eyes.

“And look at that, we have a winner.”

“But when I win, you have to do everything I put on my list? All of it?” Excitement laced his voice and just for a second Lup wonders if she’d made a mistake.

Nope. Lup never makes mistakes, scratch that.

“Those are the rules, Barold, gotta work on your comprehension skills if you want to come close to winning,” she replies, shoving the paper at him. “Read your terms, and whip up some of your own, and we can get this party started.”

Barry takes the paper from her with some reluctance, and starts to scan over the list. He smiles slightly at the first one and rolls his eyes, continuing to read silently until he got to the third. Lup watches his reactions with much attention to detail.

“Barry J. Bluejeans must provide a comprehensive list of everyone he’s ever slept with— Lup, that’s not— why do you even want that? That’s not even _that_ many people. It’s like— ” Barry stops himself before he gives a number, and clears his throat. “Fine, though, if you want to waste a term on that.”

“Oh, I sure do,” she said.

This is actually a very important term. Barry is powerful, more than he lets on with his nerdy exterior, and Lup knows from anecdotal evidence that he’s slept with more people than she would have otherwise expected. He’s just so nice, and cute, and has such a good ass, and he falls in love so easily or whatever that he has just— slept with people! And Lup _does_ need all the dirty details, obviously.

“Barry J.—you do know that’s not my middle initial, right, you do get that?—Bluejeans must cut his hair before it gets so long that he can’t see. My hair is perfectly fine. Sure, a little shaggy sometimes, but it’s not _bad_.”

“Of course, whatever you say.” Lup taps her fingers impatiently on his shoulder, until he finishes reading.

“Okay, these are good. Let me go get a pen, and I’ll make my own and sign this.” Without any warning, Barry stands. 

The second his legs vanish from under her Lup falls into an unceremonious heap on the ground. Barry looks down at her with a small grin.

“Whoops.” He turns, goes to rifle through his desk drawer. He pulls out a regular pen, another betting detail. Lup wants five sets of black and blue pens to write with, unless she could get other, better colors. Wizards were great at many things, but writing instruments was not one of them.

It takes him a couple minutes longer than it took Lup, in part because she stands hovering over his shoulder and tapping her foot until he’s done, and so he intentionally slows his writing to annoy her.

Finally, he reaches a point where Lup is audibly groaning, and only _then_ does he finish up the last couple words. 

He produces his list with a flourish, his authoritarian scrawl admittedly worse than Lup’s. Where her poor handwriting twirled and twisted in a fashion that seemed to produce art all its own, his resembled a doctor’s messy scratching. Still, it got the job done.

Lup snatches the paper from his hand, tearing a corner in the process. He chuckles quietly at that.

“Eager to see what you’ll end up doing?” he taunts, and she waves him off with a hand as she reads the terms.

“In your many, and, I’m sure, incredibly detailed dreams. I like to know what hopes I’m going to be crushing, that’s all.” 

The dream quip struck a hair deeper than Barry knows it should have. It wasn’t, okay, it really wasn’t like he spent _every single night_ dreaming of Lup. She’s a contentious rulebreaker, though, and the way she deliberately flaunts her complete disregard for his authority fucks with his subconscious in ways he couldn’t help. It was _one_ dream. That was it. One.

Except, thinking about that was enough to color his cheeks pink, which Lup pounces on.

“Oh my _god,_ I was _right,”_ she crows, caught up for just a second before she smirks at him. “No shame in dreaming about the best, trust me, babe, I get it. Also, Lup must play an edition of Pokemon of her choosing? Barry, what the fuck is a Pokemon.” She butchers the pronunciation of the word, much to Barry’s delight as well as chagrin. _Wizards._

“It’s the best muggle game ever, but I don’t trust you to listen to a description of it unbiased until you are legally bound to. So, when I win, you will learn what Pokemon is.”

“When you _lose,_ I will have to find another means of learning what the fuck that is, but there’s nothing overtly illegal in yours, and so, disappointingly, I’ll sign a document that will never see the light of day again.”

Barry rolls his eyes. Lup signs in the largest, most dramatic script he’s ever seen. And the deed is done.

* * *

The first crack in the competition came around two in the morning, a night before their Defense Against the Dark Arts test. Lup turned to glare at where Barry had been studying to find him sound asleep.

His glasses are pushed fully up on his head and he’s snoring slightly. She thinks he might be drooling. It’s disgusting, and he is ruining the books. Which is absolutely the only reason she intervenes at all, for sure. 

She glances over his shoulder at his notes while over there. Oh god, he’d written down the wrong information for that spell. Lup should leave it. Absolutely she should leave it wrong, and walk away, and let him wake up exhausted and confused in the morning. It was a small enough error that he wouldn’t notice it when reviewing his notes, he’d think it was right until he gets the test back. It’d guarantee her at least one of her demands, because they had started doing this thing where after every test they’d see who won. Whoever won got a demand from their betting list, now, instead of at the end of the semester, because waiting for the semester to end was gonna be boring as fuck.

She _should_ walk away, get her demand, ace the test. Except she doesn’t, because she’s an idiot.

Lup leans over and steals his pen, scratching out his wrong answer and writing in the correct one. She adds a winky face after. For shock factor.

And if she takes his glasses off his face and moved the books out after, well, that’s just to keep them from getting damp. She’ll swear that until the day she dies. It’s true.

Barry wakes up slowly. He rubs at his eyes, searches for his glasses. He does find it weird that he managed to put them aside before he passed out, because usually he forgets and wakes up with painful glasses mark on his face.

The correction in his notes explains it. God, she’s so obnoxious. Couldn’t even be bothered to wake him up so he could sleep in his own bed, nope, have to leave a cryptic note for him to find when he wakes up. It’s just so _smarmy_. He bets she’s wrong about the fact, too. He knows this shit, knows it well enough to trust studying it. It’ll take, like, one second of looking it up to prove his point. 

… Well. Okay. She’s right. Which means he needs to rethink things maybe a little bit. He can handle this. 

It’s with a new set of papers that Barry marches his way into the Gryffindor common room. It’s easier to get into than the Hufflepuff dorms, because it doesn’t take a lot to get a password out of some first years. They really do need to have talks with the first years about intimidation. They are far too easy to manipulate. For now, though, it did help him, so it could be filed under later problems.

Lup’s not in her room, luckily. She’s sitting with one leg on the table, the other tucked underneath her, in only boxers and a sports bra. Barry definitely doesn’t notice that. His eyes don’t flicker for too long over a stomach that’s more toned than it has any right to be. Nope.

Instead, he slams the papers down in front of her. She, startles, looks up at him, raises an eyebrow.

“What’s all the fuss over? Don’t tell me you’re backing out of the contract before you even have to fulfill a term, Barold,” Lup quips at him.

“Not that. Listen, I’ll hate this as much, if not more than you, but we need to study together. We both know what the other is missing. You know it’s true.” He refuses to back down on this point.

Lup clicks her tongue at him. “Hmm, doubt it. I’m wrong less than you, not sure what _I’d_ be getting out of this sweet sweet bargain.” 

Barry rolls his eyes and grabs her notes, despite her protests. He skims through them with a pencil, scanning each line. It takes him a minute to find a mistake, but there’s always mistakes in work. He underlines it when he did.

“Wrong ingredient, you misheard the professor and I didn’t that day. If I hadn’t found this, you’d have failed the practical next week.”

Lup narrows her eyes at him, snatching back her notes, clearly with the intention of saying he was wrong, but she reads it, reads the rest of the page, and realizes that, horrors and horrors, he’s right. She sighs, heavy, and scribbles it out to add the correct ingredient. Barry waits, patiently, until she looks bac up and says, “Fine. We can study together. No academic sabotage or anything, just good old fashioned nerding out. Sounds like a trip.”

Barry grins, and she will not admit to finding it adorable. He turns to leave, and she _will_ admit to watching him go.

There are some things that are undeniable. Barry’s ass is one of those things. Lup holds no shame in it.

* * *

Here’s the thing with studying together, though. It leads to things that Lup _cannot_ deny, at least, not in good conscience. Studying together means late nights, means distracting Barry whenever she chews on the end of a borrowed pen and looking up to wink at him when he realizes he’s been caught staring and looks away blushing. It means finding the blushing cute, and pushing boundaries and convincing Barry to come study on one of the comfy Gryffindor common room couches, and inevitably falling asleep on his shoulder.

It means that she wakes up early morning with a pained neck and seeing him asleep, too, and wanting to wake him up with kisses or _something._

Studying together means bad things for this rivalry. Lup can’t be getting distracted, that’s illegal. She needs to concentrate, get the demands on her bet list, keep motivated because competition with Barry is _fun_ in a way that she doesn’t normally find schoolwork.

So, yeah, maybe she does something a bit illegal, after month two of their studying together, nearing the end of the semester.

 _Maybe_ she adds that whole “make out with me” clause to her betting demands.

 _Maybe_ it inspires her even more to win.

And maybe that’s what leads her to the door of the Room of Requirement, the day before the end of the semester, knowing that Barry is already in there so they can go over their betting demands again.

And maybe he even says yes.


End file.
